Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist - Hardcover

Phelps, Christopher

3.67

9 ratings by Goodreads

9780801433283: Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801433282 ISBN 13: 9780801433283

Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr, 1997

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"This is a provocative, elegantly crafted piece of our intellectual history. Phelps's rediscovery of Hook's radical philosophy is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the fate of the American left."--Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History

"Like other famous rebels who eventually came home to patriotism and conservatism, Hook's life is one of breathtaking intellectual twists and turns. He occupied, at one time or another, almost every intellectual position available on the left: Leninist, Trotskyist, right-wing Socialist plus several nuances between them. . . . Christopher Phelps, in his persuasive new biography of young Sidney Hook, . . . strives . . . to uncover the young philosopher and activist at the height of his powers. What he discovers is not just a brilliant interpreter of Marx and the Russian Revolution, but a remarkable advocate and practitioner of the Americanization of Marxism."--Jim Gilbert, In These Times

"Sidney Hook's critics and admirers have long held that his pragmatism was incompatible with his early Marxist politics. In this fine book, Christopher Phelps shows why they are wrong and, in the process, offers the first major study of Hook's intellectual development and political activism."--Casey Blake, Washington University (Department of History) or identify as author of Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

"The very best kind of intellectual biography sheds light not only on the life and ideas of its subject but on a whole tradition of though and a historical epoch. This deeply intelligent and elegantly written book does all those things admirably, and has the added--and rare--virtue of making its own original contribution to the clarification of some thorny issues in social theory, and Marxist theory in particular."--Ellen Meiksins Wood, author of Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism

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From the Back Cover:

Of great relevance to contemporary debates about socialism and democracy, Young Sidney Hook reopens the controversial question of the relationship between Marxism and pragmatism. In the first biography of philosopher Sidney Hook to be published since his death in 1989, Christopher Phelps vividly describes the neglected early thought and political history of this important New York intellectual, pragmatist philosopher, and anti-Stalinist polemicist. Throughout the Cold War decades, Hook was a notoriously strident anti-communist. But in his earlier life, he had a very different career as a talented radical philosopher and Marxist scholar who argued for replacing capitalism with a more democratic society. Challenging scholars on both the left (who see Hook's early beliefs as ill-conceived) and the right (who see them as immature), Phelps explores the contributions young Hook made to social theory, ethics, politics, epistemology, and discussions of scientific method.

From Library Journal:

Sidney Hook came to believe that socialism as an economic system had failed in our time because it had neither solved the problem of incentive nor found a substitute for the free market to give people what they needed and wanted. The failure, he held, occurred because, contrary to Marx's prescription, societies were collectivized before the forces of production had peaked. Phelps argues that even as a Marxian activist, Hook was not dogmatic but regarded Marxism as a judgment of practice, to be appraised experimentally. In tying Marxism to American conditions, he mingled it with pragmatic naturalism, abandoning socialism when he saw it as suppressing the freedom of democratic liberalism. Phelps believes that the young Hook saw more clearly than the old Hook, and that many of his ideas of the 1920s and 1930s are still worth testing in practice. An interesting examination of an independent Marxist.?Robert Hoffman, York Coll. of CUNY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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